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Alliance Defense Fund Starts New Website To Try And Prevent Repeal Of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

07/07/10-by Bridgette P. LaVictorie
The Alliance Defense Fund is busy, once again, trying to spread the propaganda that repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell will result in the limitation of chaplain’s right to proselytize their religion to everyone that they feel should be forced into their religious beliefs. Military chaplains minister to all religions whether or not they agree with their religious beliefs or not. This means that they have to be proficient in giving last rights in nearly every religion that is represented within the military. If they are Catholic chaplains, they must be able to give the last rights ceremony for Hinduism and so forth.

Of course, the ADF does not really care about that. What they are trying to do is prevent lesbians and gays from serving openly and possibly making their chaplains a little uncomfortable with having to defy their religious beliefs of what God supposedly says about homosexuality.

According to the ADF’s new website “Normalizing homosexual behavior in the armed forces would require Christian military chaplains to confront a profoundly difficult moral choice: whether they are to obey God or to obey men. If they refuse to obey men and share their religious beliefs on immoral sexual conduct, then they may be punished by censorship, discrimination complaints, and destroyed careers. And if chaplains are kept from teaching and counseling on their beliefs, then the men and women in uniform who share their faith and rely on their instruction will consequently lose the ability to freely exercise their faith. And no American, especially those serving in the armed forces, should be forced to abandon their religious beliefs.”

Of course, if they proselytize their faith too much and tell people that worshiping more than one deity is wrong, they run into the same problem. The issue here is not about what the chaplains might end up experiencing, but rather what they want to do to continue their homophobia. This is not about religious beliefs, but about prejudice, and groups like the ADF do not want to admit that.

The people that the ADF have supporting their ideological institution of homophobia are all retired chaplains and likely to not understand what the current military is like. The younger generation of soldiers are more accepting about homosexuality and many of them are willing to serve with their lesbian and gay colleagues without the policy of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell being in place.

The ADF has promoted the normalization of homosexuality as an attack upon the religious freedoms of the American people and upon the Christians of this nation without any real foundation upon which to make that argument. The vast majority of lesbians, gays, and transsexuals the nation over would rather go to friendly churches, and do so. They do not go to fundamentalist churches, and because the United States allows for religious freedom, they have that right. Instead, the ADF is more about institutionalizing homophobia and their own religious beliefs no matter what other religions believe.

Military chaplains have to walk a fine line between their own religious beliefs and respecting the lives and religious beliefs of others. They already have to do this, and repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell will not change that. In fact, it may make it easier in the long run for the chaplains to help those in need since they can deal with the problems that people are facing or at least be able to pass along the person in need to someone who can help.